The Brother Brother Brother Podcast
1. Agree to make a podcast.
2. Google “how to make a podcast.”
3. Make a podcast.
In 2016, despite having zero experience as a producer, I agreed to create, launch, and produce the music podcast Brother Brother Brother. It was a learning process, but that’s how I like to do it.
Name
The show would feature three brothers, born in three different decades, talking about the one thing that kept them together despite their generational differences: music. We landed on “Brother Brother Brother” after the lyric in Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On?”
Logo
The cross-generational theme factored into my idea for the logo. Three typographies inspired by the decades in which the hosts were born: 70’s punk, 80’s glam, and 90s hip-hop.
Logline
I wrote a logline for the podcast, which became an essential selling point anytime we discussed or pitched the show.
Website
I built a site to host the show and publish episodes, including bios for the hosts, embedded Spotify playlists for each episode, an integrated Instagram feed featuring live concert photography, and a blog. The design was clean, simple, black & white. Rock and roll.
Production
Recording was the first challenge. The three hosts and I all live in separate cities. I figured out a method for us to record episodes remotely over the phone (long before COVID-era remote records were a thing), each recording separate tracks that I would then edit and mix together. I taught myself how to edit, and we were off to the races.
Once we figured out recording, I created an episode narrative structure, contracted with Simon Doom (a musician from the bands MGMT and Modest Mouse) for the show's intro music, and figured out the nuts and bolts of multi-platform publishing. Then, we had a show.
Artist Outreach
A goal of ours was to insert ourselves into the indie rock conversation. We started by contacting up-and-coming artists for interviews, leveraging their influence and built-in audiences.
Press
We targeted the press early, highlighting the unique backstory of the hosts and landed features on NPR’s “Here & Now” and the Boston Globe.
Guerilla Marketing
... and we plastered our logo all over music venues in New York, Boston, and San Francisco.
Live Shows
In 2017, we began taking the show on the road. In July, we hosted our first live podcast at the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall, England, where the hosts interviewed authors Geoff Dyer and Richard Mason about the intersection between music and literature. Later that year, we hosted two separate live events at the Met in New York City.
The App
In 2018, I led a partnership with Clip Interactive to design, build, and launch an official podcast app. This provided listeners with curated bonus content for each episode, a social feed for the show, and a "Talk Back" feature that enabled fans to share their opinions with us directly.
